A REPORT OF THE BIG FLOOD FROM THE NON-REZ SIDE

VALIER NOTES FROM 2004

A RECURRING FEATURE CALLED “TURNING BACK THE PAGES”.  I think this is from the Valierian.

20 YEARS EARLIER

Pictured was Lake Francis, showing that due to extreme dry conditions, the lake has disappeared and you could drive across the lake bed to the island.

Valier’s Chief of Police, Horace Pete, graduated from an eight-week course at the Police Academy in Bozeman.

40 YEARS EARLIER

Two Medicine and Swift Dam collapsed, sending a twenty-foot wall of water surging down Birch Creek and Badger Creek.  Bruce Milne, Superintendent of Schools, organized a search team in an effort to locate survivors or pick up bodies that might have been washed ashore.  Red Cross officials arrived and a mobile communications system was set up in the high school gym.  Women of Valier and the surrounding area responded to the call for help in feeding and clothing the 104 refugees who were being brought to the gym by helicopter.  These people had spent the night at the Grandview School.  

Some of the tragic losses were:  Ernie Lauffer, Mrs.Tom Hall and five children; the eight year old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Bradley (Mrs. Bradley was missing for a time but managed to cling to a log until rescued); the four year old son of Mr. and Mrs Chet Thomas, Jr.; an eighteen year old Arneaux girl (niece of Mrs. Wally Hall); Mr. and Mrs. Newbreast and baby of Birch Creek (ten of the children are safe); Mr. Gil England; Mrs. Mary Hall (mother of Tom Hall); Happy Williams; and many others whose names were not available at the time.

The new home of Mr. and Mrs. Ernie King was swept away by the flood but the family managed to save some of their furnishings.  Mr. and Mrs. Ray Davis also lost their home all belongings.

Sarah Walley, son Jerry, daughter Sharon, and her four boys had a narrow escape from onrushing waters as they tried to salvage furnishings from Jerry’s house.  They got out just ahead of the water.  They had managed to save 200 chickens by moving them to higher ground earlier in the day.

The Town of Valier suffered no great damage from the flood, though we were practically inundated for a time.  For example, water backed up over the sidewalks and began running into the new bank.  Several pounds of flour were piled along the front of the bank in an effort to halt the flow of water.

Mary Jane Stark and several Methodist Youth members were reported safe at MYF Camp on Flathead Lake.  Although they didn’t know when they would be able to return home.

Ora Lohse did a tremendous job with rescue operations.  He spent a lot of hours in the air, and was willing to go wherever needed.  We owe him a debt of gratitude.

Dr. Cannon and nurses from Valier and surrounding towns went to Dupuyer to administer typhoid shots to people of that area.

Mr. and Mrs. Merrill Kuka had a harrowing experience when they noticed the floodwaters heading for their home.  As they started to drive away, a live power line hit and shattered the windshield and killed the motor and the heat from the live wire soldered the car door shut.  Fortunately, the motor started again and they were able to flee to safety.

70 YEARS EARLIER

Valier is making elaborate plans to entertain a large crowd of visitors on the Fourth of July.  Mr. Fuller, manager of the Airport Inn, announces that he will have a special program for the day that will include a brilliant showing of fireworks, swimming, dancing, floor show, water sports, a baseball game, boating, motor boat races, row boat races, speed boat trips, airplane rides and fishing.

High water in Birch Creek and Dupuyer Creek caused by the heavy rains of last week did considerable damage.  A total of 4.58 inches of precipitation was recorded which constitutes a new record for June rainfall.  The bridge at Heart Butte and three bridges at the Hamilton Ranch were lost.  HA Gooken lost 130 sheep and Frank Hughes lost 50 sheep to the high water.  Daniel Slezak suffered the heaviest loss when the waters in the creek left the bank and washed away 40 tons of coal valued at $300.

Dr. Powell drove to the Emil Verstraete place northest of Valier and operated on four year old Mary Verstaete for a ruptured appendix.

THOSE WHO SUPPORT REZ SOVEREIGNTY

“ Today's other big SCOTUS case: The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a large chunk of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation, a decision that state and federal officials have warned could throw Oklahoma into chaos. The court's 5-4 decision, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, means that Oklahoma prosecutors lack the authority to pursue criminal cases against American Indian defendants in parts of Oklahoma that include most of Tulsa, the second-largest city."

July 9, 2020, 9:01 AM MDT / Source: Associated Press

By Associated Press

“WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a large chunk of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation, a decision that state and federal officials have warned could throw Oklahoma into chaos.

The court's 5-4 decision, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, means that Oklahoma prosecutors lack the authority to pursue criminal cases against American Indian defendants in parts of Oklahoma that include most of Tulsa, the second-largest city.

The court's ruling casts doubt on hundreds of convictions won by local prosecutors. The case, argued by telephone in May because of the coronavirus pandemic, revolved around an appeal by an American Indian who claimed state courts had no authority to try him for a crime committed on reservation land that belongs to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/supreme-court-rules-swath-oklahoma-remains-tribal-reservation-n1233315

____________________________________________

In the excitement over the ruling on Trump’s resistance to subpoenas for his records, I missed another challenge to the Rule of Law that is quite different.  The Supreme Court voted to uphold laws governing the sovereign status of tribes in Oklahoma.  These laws were written generations ago without any grasp of how the world would change and in the blind faith that they would go on being relevant.  Or possibly be solved by time, that Indians would simply dissolve. (Where have we heard that idea?)

We’ve drifted far away from the world the way it was at the time treaties were written and don’t much like what the Rule of Law requires today.  If we literally do as we declared we would, half of Canada would belong to the indigenous people, right?  A big part of Seattle would be indigenously owned.  No one can define “Indians” without dispute and it’s a misnomer anyway.

Media were reluctant to point out the origin of the lawsuit because it is incendiary given our cultural attitudes toward “pedophilia.”

___________________________________________

“The case the justices decided Thursday involved 71-year-old Jimcy McGirt, who is serving a 500-year prison sentence for molesting a child. Oklahoma state courts rejected his argument that his case does not belong in Oklahoma courts and that federal prosecutors should instead handle his case.

“McGirt could potentially be retried in federal court, as could Patrick Murphy, who was convicted of killing a fellow tribe member in 1999 and sentenced to death. But Murphy would not face the death penalty in federal court for a crime in which prosecutors said he mutilated the victim and left him to bleed to death on the side of a country road about 80 miles southeast of Tulsa.”

by Taboola

_____________________________________

One problem with the Rule of Law is tied to its purpose in the first place, to try to escape cultural emotion about offenses as they originate.  People are like the puppy who doesn’t look at either a treat or a danger to which you are pointing, but devotes all his interest to the finger.  A written law is meant to be consistent and dependable.  But even college educated people (for what that’s worth) give their basic attention and reaction to the offense itself.  It’s a human response of empathy, which is the source of compassion.  Why would we want to discourage that?

In considering indigenous people’s responses, a complication is millennia of oral discussion as a group, which pulls in the people of the specific persons concerned.  This gets complicated again when anthropologists try to defend cultural wholes that are indeed disappearing over time.  In my half-century of contact with the Blackfeet I have seen the People change.  The larger national culture has also changed radically with the “old people” just dying out now.  

But we hate change.  We’re uneasy with laws, esp. the written ones.  They can be unevenly enforced, not enforced at all by friends of the government, or reinterpreted.  We’re in too much of a hurry to hash out things like definitions.  They say that if one looks at how people survive, more people are in slavery today than when it was the law to be owned.

Which is another problem with the Rule of Law, which is the definition and recording of boundaries. How can murdering a child by sexual mutilation be prosecuted on one side of a line and not on the other side?  Why isn’t there a universal human law, a commandment for everyone?  An unforgivable atrocity?  And yet a thing happens again and again, regardless of location or culture, because the structure and capacity of the human mind and emotions have recurrent dynamics that go back to mammals — tomcats and lions killing cubs and kittens.  Can a Rule of Law even be understood by all humans?  Is incarceration meant to be a punishment or a zoo for dangerous animals?

Reservations were not originally meant to be anything very clearly defined — mostly a political solution going back to the original idea of defining lines between kingdoms so they wouldn’t be always at war — just when the boundary was challenged.  But how can there be rival kingdoms when Lewis and Clark traveled through the continent where the people had no idea that France had just sold them to the United States.

There were some idealists who believed that if we “bought” the land, then we owed the indigenous people the kind of support we would give citizens.  Treaties were meant to define a mercantile relationship.  Over time the pre-existing dwellers became more and more citizens, but their tribal citizenship began to compete with US Rule of Law in a lot of careless or ignorant ways — mostly on the Euro-defined side. 

The truth is that we have very little idea what we’re doing.  Merely writing down sales and product definition is not enough.  So where’s the next thing?

THE SIXTIES ON THE REZ (A reblog)

[PDF] THE HERO'S JOURNEY IN JAMES WELCH'S SACRED GEOGRAPHY by JHC Vest - 2005 - Using an auto-criticism reflecting the author's ... James Welch's Fools Crow has figured greatly in that odyssey

www2.brandonu.ca/Library/cjns/25.1/cjnsv25no1_pg337-353.pdf 

Jay came through Browning (I suppose he was actually in Missoula with side trips) at a liminal time -- meaning “on a threshold,” because that piece across the bottom of the door is called the limen. The same word, sometimes spelled “limin” means the threshold of perception, the least amount of sensation that can be detected. Psychologically and theologically, it is meant to be the point of entrance, transition, crossing, often into holiness or at least potential. It was a liminal time for the whole planet as the cultures shifted towards openness and experiment; for me because I was newly divorced; and for Jay because he was just reaching that point in a young man’s life when he’s trying to figure out his identity.

Normally there’s a lot of thrashing around, experimenting, emotion, and risking at such a time and that was certainly the case with Jay. I don’t think I ever exchanged two words with him, but there were conversations about him -- sometimes approving and other times not. He was one of the MANY who came thinking that if they could sort of meld with the Blackfeet, they would become powerful and knowing. The trouble was that they usually picked out advisors who were pretty full of it, to be frank. Tricksters. I won’t name them. Of course, I have a certain point of view which is that of a white female older woman. Sceptical. A little over-experienced. Okay, cynical. After all, I’d known some of these people since they were twelve and my husband and father-in-law were older than most of them, as old as the enrolled grandfather elders and here since 1903. 

Liminal time in the theatre is when the curtain goes up. In church it is the call to worship. At a concert it is the first chord after the tuning up. At that time this country's crossing of the limin into some new way of being was almost to the point of critical mass, the tipping point. Something happened and the whole political scene backed off. I think just became terrified, maybe like now.

Jay was pursuing his degree, now in hand. Both of us have gone through many new spaces since then, stepped over many a limin. My hope is -- and I think there is some evidence -- that the world is again crossing a threshold, but the point is that in a liminal time/space anything can happen. The car is out of gear. There is space to be Dionysian, even with an Apollonian president. But immense destruction can be one result.

The paper about “The Hero’s Journey in James Welch’s “Fools Crow” is competent and engaging, useful in particular for people who don’t have much background in Blackfeet matters. I see that now Jay is claiming his own enrollment in the Mohacan Indian Nation but I don’t know much about that group.

The paper called “The Oldman River and the Sacred: A Meditation Upon Aputosi Pii’kani Tradition and Environmental Ethics” is the one that had me wielding two colors of highlighter and scribbling in the margins. There is really good stuff in this paper, mixing realistic sociology with story and theory. Of course, I like it because it’s theory I can understand.

SOCIOLOGY: “. . .the Pii’kani community was divided in response to the dam, which created a position easily exploited by the outside interests. Since Native Modernists, motivated by poverty, tend to be willing to accept change provided it brings the promise of monetary benefit, they were largely unopposed to the environmental degradation. It was, however , the Pii’kani traditionalists who had the most to lose. In the traditionalists’ identification with place, specifically the Oldman River, these Natives were impacted with a major disruption of their religious ethos and cultural identity.” 

STORY: “According to Campbell, mythology concerns the mystical dimension, for without this you have ideology. Myth also concerns ‘the pedagogy of the individual, giving him a guiding track to guide him along.’”

THEORY: “Elements of this [spiritual] integration include include: first, purification of body, soul, and spirit; second, spiritual expansion in realizing a relationship to all that is; and third, identity or realization of unity in a state of oneness with the totality.” (The reference is to Joseph Epes Brown, “ The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian,” 1982 p. 113. Vest studied with Brown.)

These ideas have not been exhausted and the development of ecological and scientific awareness of a changing planet makes them sharply useful. I’m a little surprised that Jay doesn’t pick up on some of the more recent thought. Many of the people he quotes have been gone for some years, which doesn’t make them less true and useful, but the torch has not been extinguished -- just handed on. Today the challenge is the Alberta Tar Sands and international high-tension power lines. The corporations are far more dangerous and powerful than anything in the Seventies.

Jay seems not to have heard about the “RENEGOTIATION OF THE BLACKFEET REALITY” . . . strongly challenging the idea of “culture,” which is so obsessed with accuracy that it tries to freeze everything at one point in time when, in fact, the shared lives of people on the land is always dynamic and changes as it goes.” (Quote from the recent history seminar at Piegan Institute.) Nor has he heard about Jack Gladstone’s generous troubador synthesis of song, philosophy, tradition and land.

There is a website where students critique their professors and Jay took some hard comments, mostly having to do with rigidity. I realize that today’s college students tend to be a self-important and contemptuous lot, but it sounds as though now HE’s the Culture Police, quoting a stack of white men’s books and telling about things that happened to him a half-century ago. Why does this happen so often? It seems as though he ought to be here celebrating and growing with the rest of us.

Maybe we should organize a convocation of all those white and low-quantum guys who came through here in the Sixties and Seventies, looking for liminality. Some found it and were transformed. We should find out what it did for them. And see what they can do for us.

Friday, August 27, 2010

A WEB OF HOLOCAUSTS

A category that is not a category exists only in my mind.  Maybe half-a-dozen educated white people who have been visiting the Blackfeet since maybe the Sixties are known to me.  That is: myself, Adolf Hungry Wolf, Alice Kehoe, Ken Lowensgaard, Sid Gustafson, and a few more.  Some are dead now.  One moved to Europe.  We don’t necessarily know each other.  I’m not counting the white merchants and ranchers whose children are now enrolled. We’re in touch mostly online.  Some have written books.  

When Mike Swims Under died, Adolf knew many of the ceremonial songs.  Ken Lowensgaard and Sid Gustafson were here as youngsters.  Alice Kehoe is an anthro professor who has usually spent her summers here and has written books.  We are people who know this rez in quite a different way than most people, whether they could be considered Blackfeet or even tribal or not.  We do not agree about what we see or what we would recommend.

When viral holocaust hit the Blackfeet on the US side of the high prairie east of the Rockies, it came in waves. Maybe the first was smallpox which could survive on fabrics.  “Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by one of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980. The risk of death following contracting the disease was about 30%, with higher rates among babies.”  It may have survived as a weapon.  WHO may not survive Trump.

Of course there were always natural disasters in every millennia, but “settlement” made the former nomads more vulnerable, and there are places on this rez that are blind to electronics like radio or telephone.  No warning possible. The Big Flood was as much a financial and emotional blow as a pandemic, though it didn’t kill high numbers.  The tourist trade was shut down that summer, much like now.

Race is meaningless in terms of skin color or manner of dress.  What counts is culture, which is a way of being, central practices, rooted in ecoculture.  So it was not the atrocities — like murdering a whole band/family of people by mistake and by stealth in spite of an individual peace agreement — that did so much to impose a holocaust as it was the continuing killing of buffalo on which the culture was based.  Restoring buffalo today is interesting, but the culture that went with it did not and can not come back.

Residential schools are blamed for killing the culture, but the continuing web of truant officers, school bus systems that became a minor culture along the routes, and the German military organization of “grades”, “steps”, categorizing, national texts, and teacher training have continued to force people to conform.  Now a few ways of escaping have reappeared with home schooling, charter schools,  religious schools, are pushing back — because “white” people are rebelling as well. The national WASP culture is seriously eroded and confused, a world class holocaust that affects the notion of globalization as covid-19 travels around the world.  At the same time people like Adolf in his log cabin he built himself, he is talking to people around the planet with his computer running on electricity generated by a roll-up photovoltaic panel.  I publish this blog that is read by a thousand people daily on every major continent. I used to run a blog gadget from clustrmaps that showed a dot every time they made contact, but I don’t use it now because the governments and international criminals were using it to find their enemies.

The holocaust of right now is the killing of secrecy, the murder of the ability of slide in and out of the mostly white control by simply disappearing.  After all, non-whites all look alike to them now that the cultural cues like blankets or braids or language have either been weakened or lost.  But anyway the categories have been reinvented, romanticized, so that now it is thought to be admirable to be a “savage” who is making Rousseau (and a lot of other French philosophers) very happy.  So pleasant to stiff those stiff English, whose elite force their own children into residential schools where perversion based on force is alive and well.  Only a princess can resist them — to a point.

At 80 I am old enough to have known survivors of the “Baker” or Bear River Massacre on January 23, 1870, and to have watched while the memory was brought back to life.  Also, “white” kids I taught and who went on to higher education and successful careers have become surprising members of the tribe.  The Blackfeet are now intermarried with Cree, Flatheads, Mexican tribes, Filipinos, Germans, and even a few Blacks, though most of them arrived as children with mothers who had survived the relocation holocaust of being moved to city ghettos.  They also came with a lot of resistance ideas.

The Pan-Indian movement formed from joining forces politically but also out of the residential higher education schools where marriage-age youngsters fell in love with partners from other tribes, but because the government never expected such a thing, they cannot claim Indian Identity since the pesky records of provenance, (begats), misrepresented as “blood quantum” as though birth had something to do with A,B, or O proteins used to find compatible transfusions or maybe something to do with the intricacies of molecular genetics.  

Alas, analysis of genomes which the tribes suspiciously resist as just another plot, reveal that A) there is more difference among the members of the tribe than between tribes so that only hustlers and Oprah think you can tell which tribe is which, and B) the basic 98% of code for American indigenous people comes from Asia, mostly the SE islands whose boatmanship could cross the Pacific.  Maybe not on purpose.

The individuals at the beginning of this post came mostly in the Sixties and Seventies when much of this thought had not formed yet, but they’ve been open to sciences of all kinds and keen to learn ideas that might become a new culture.  But there will not be one new culture.  It will be a range of adaptations to circumstances that persist long enough for people to feel like a group.  These individuals will have been gone a long time, but their writing might persist. There were never enough of them to form a tribe.

COMPARATIVE CULTURE

Comparative religion is a formal field taught at some universities.  Wikipedia, in its arrogant whiteboy Anglo way, says you can do many kinds of upper class things with it but not be clergy of any religion.  Fat lot they know.  Theism is their only key and criterion.  Indigenous religion doesn’t exist to them — only the institutions that have gotten big enough to have a political impact.  The anti-institutional Jesus gets lost under Paul’s letters about how to be important and big and more like the Romans.

Comparative culture goes on all the time and many address it, though it has a tendency to become psychology, going on about narcissism and depression, and only recently coming to things that were always considered to be anthropology as invented to cope with the news that if one left England for other continents, people there were different.  Their religions were so different it was hard to tell that’s what they were.

Cultures are a version of “race” which is a made-up category to explain a concentration of people pretty much alike at the center but thinning out towards the edges where they could claim the center or not.  My current reading book “The Great Human Diasporas” is interested in tracing the clusters and evolutions of genomes — not appearances though those result -- but the actual bioelectrochemical formulas of people, overlain and compared to linguistic “trees” and anecdotes of history to explain them.  Generally, they all fit together with no reference to religion, but if religion were included, the pattern wouldn’t be that different.

Though people unconsciously form a kind of personal belief system, which scientists now suggest is formed in the first years of life and is actually a physical structure in the brain, there is also a shared social system of the best way to conduct one’s life in a specific time and place, in what we now call an “ecology” meaning how things fit together to benefit each other.  If one is raised in one weather and political climate and then goes to another, there can be difficulties.  Even specifically Christian denominations are each different transplanted ecologies in response to different influences, usually socioeconomic but possibly ethnic, from another time and place.  

A major problem now is that the science of the educated world today makes the science of the world until the 20th century pretty much obsolete.  One cannot keep proclaiming that God is a Big Guy in the Sky is more than a sometimes wicked metaphor.  We are at a point when the key to Christianity, which is the Western concept of biological family, has been called into question.  This has terrifying consequences when one considers that’s Trump’s madness was formed by his bad relationship with his father and that the idea of “mafia” is based on family imposition of criminal order.

It is a sign of hope that Il Papa, the Pope, is an embodiment of Jesus rather than a Roman Emperor.

Human culture arises when a forming human being, guided by family, meets the environment, much of which is human beings.  The father and son Gavalli-Sforzas, authors of my "'diaspora book", had fallen in love with pygmies, a group of small dark jungle people that big white city people thought were not human.  But once known, the pygmy culture turned out to be excellent, both fitting and tolerant.  They were strange enough to most of us to be fascinating in a “National Geographic” way, which is nearly a religion and certainly comparative.

The major problems arise when the larger context — that which envelops the planet and even the cosmos — exceeds anything we had awareness of or even have words for.  Or — as now — the changes like the overwhelming climate shifts we are experiencing that are outside our capacity to control and happen too quickly to adapt.  Even the genome we were just beginning to pin down has now allowed the invasion of virus particles that we don’t even consider alive.  Prion diseases from “misfolded molecules” came out of nowhere and may be what causes senile dementia.  What should make us deeply humble and maybe terrified has caused many people to either revert to earlier times, maybe agricultural again, or to go wild on drugs and sex.

Wildness is not bad.  Discipline is not necessarily helpful.  Lives can be lost by an excess of either.  Time and circumstances have allowed cultures to develop complexity, so some people can be the elite of thought and others can be the berzerkers who fling themselves into violence.  A comparative culture person would try to figure out who’s what and why.  What does becoming a ballet dancer signify?  It began as a court dance in long skirts and has now become somehow entwined with sex, sometimes danced nude.  How the heck did that happen?

Every culture is a continuum, including dance culture.  At one end it might be so formal and idealistic as to be near inhuman, while at the other end is a kid twirling upside down on a piece of cardboard flung down on a sidewalk.  We’ve become interested in “primitive” movement and exploratory movement, so some people can seem made of rubber.  Towards the other end is the formal ball or partner dancing on ice, highly prescribed and synchronized.

The same is true of writing or clothes or houses.  We seem to be ending a time of insupportable extravagance, houses that are slabs of glass.  Our own flesh has become a slave to fashion, slimmed and painted.  At the other extreme are people engulfed in obesity, dressed in scraps, defiant and shrieking.

The consequence of living in a culture that is not one’s own is unpredictable.  This one, quietly agricultural, was destroyed by modern international and criminal corporations exploiting grain to be a political weapon.  Now the remnants provide shelter for urban criminals who pretend innocence.  We’re beginning to catch on to the internet, but still must drive long distances for health care and serious shopping.  Families are fighting hard to stay intact, since college degrees can scatter everyone but without qualifications, work is scarce.

One's best skill is curiosity.

HELEN CLARKE (A RE-BLOG)

This re-blog is prompted by new interest in the status of the "Lodge" or "Big Hotel" in East Glacier Park. The land under both this building and the town evidently were once the allotment of reservation land that belonged to Helen and Horace Clarke.  Since one of Helen's duties was to actually draw up and assign these allotments, she must have been the one who claimed that land, probably knowing that the lodge was meant to be a feeder for the Great Northern railroad.  No one knows what or how money was involved.  Those searching ancient records in the archives of the railroad moguls of the time are Blackfeet.  The Big Hotel has not been profitable in recent years, whatever that implies.

Now that our colorful governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, has announced that he will not run for Baucus’ seat in the Senate, one of the names being mentioned is Denise Juneau, our beautiful Blackfeet Superintendent of the state Office of Public Instruction.  Actually, only her dad is Blackfeet.  Her mother is Hidatsa/Mandan/Arikara, tribes that conflated when they were decimated by smallpox because they were at the headwaters of the Mississipi River and thereby vulnerable to what was carried on river steamboats.  The advantage of their location was that they were traders, used to braiding together and interfacing cultures.  Lewis and Clark wintered there on the first leg of their journey.  The tribe was also the source of the Kipp progenitor whose descendants went from vigorous entrepreneurs to vigorous educators.

Helen Clarke

But this is not about Denise.  Rather I want to lift up Helen Clarke, the first Blackfeet school superintendent in Montana -- actually I think she may be the first Montana school superintendent, period.   She is the hinge-person, the lynch-pin, of the Clarke family generations which continue today as an art gallery in East Glacier run by Joyce Clarke Turvey.  The book “A Mixture of So Many Bloods: A Family Saga of the American West” by Andrew Graybill, is outlined at this url  http://scarlet.unl.edu/?p=6484  The book has been postponed by several forces: the usual being money and politics, but also Graybill’s acceptance of the directorship of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.  Now his focus will shift from the Montana border to the SW. But DAMMIT!  I WANT THAT BOOK!!  

I went searching, which didn’t work until I contacted Graybill directly.  The title is now:  “The Red and the White:  A Family Saga of the American West.”  Due out in October, about the time Graybill will be a keynote speaker at the Montana Festival of the Book.  http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294976104

Why are publishers fooling around with books about teens who masturbate when they could have been publishing (and hopefully selling movie rights) the stories of women like Helen Clarke and Natoyista Culbertson!  (The latter HAS had books written about her: “Frontier Diplomats: The Life and times of Alexander Culbertson and Natoyist-Siksina” by Lesley Wischman as well as a fictionalized version by Mildred Walker (“If a Lion Could Talk”) as well as articles in “Montana, the Magazine of Western History.”  The independent historian, Jack Holterman, wrote about Natoyista so much that some accused him of having a psychic love affair with her.  Impossible to blame him!

Natawista Culbertson

In the Spring 2011 issue of that same magazine appears an article by Andrew Graybill entitled “Helen P. Clarke in “The Age of Tribes”: Montana’s Changing Racial Landscape, 1870-1920.”  It’s a bit of the book-to-come which whets my appetite even more.  Malcolm Clarke, in case you’re a newbie, was murdered by his Blackfeet wife’s cousin, which triggered the “Baker Massacre” a mistaken atrocity in which a drunken cavalry killed a small group of peace-declared (supposedly protected) people suffering from smallpox.  The men were hunting and the weather was sub-zero.  A few people, some of them children, escaped barefoot over the frozen river to other camps.  All lodges and supplies were burned.  Some claimed that living people were burned as well.  This story is told over and over and over.

This article is the much longer and more meaningful story of the trigger, the attack on Malcolm -- not much of a surprise since his Indian name was “Four Bears,” probably because of his temperament.  Guesses at the trigger range from horse theft to rape.  The attack happened on the ranch Malcolm owned, now the Baucus family ranch not far from Helena.  Malcolm, like Baucus, was political.  It is particularly strategic because it is in a narrow access valley where it was possible to charge toll on the road.  Do not picture howling savages circling the house and shooting fire arrows.  The murderers had stayed to dinner and were cousins of Malcolm’s full- blood wife.  It was more like a bar brawl.  But the renegades threw Malcolm’s body down the well and injured the two sons.  Helen and her sister escaped out an upstairs window, over the roof, and away.  

Helen, the oldest child, had been educated in a convent in Cincinnati,Ohio, where Malcolm sent her and her brother, Horace, who didn’t stay.  She came home just a few years before the murder and left soon after with her sisters to live in Minneapolis with Malcolm’s sister.  Then Helen went on to New York City where, in Graybill’s words, she “began a brief but acclaimed stage career.”  She traveled with Sarah Bernhardt in Europe but one must realize that this were the time period of the American Civil War and the Prussian Siege of Paris that killed thousands by starvation.  1864 is the year Montana became a territory and Tolstoi published “War and Peace.”  1870 was the end of the Red River Rebellion in Canada, which spun off many Metis to Blackfeet country.  (I’m not pulling this out of my head.  I have an extremely useful reference book called “The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events” by Bernard Grun (1946, 1963))

In 1872 Nathan, who with Horace had gone with the Cavalrymen who attacked Heavy Runner’s band, got into a knife fight with the father of nineteen-year-old girl he wanted to marry and was murdered.  The man was a Metis named Swan.  Race had suddenly become an issue and prosperity could make you white.  Economics always trumps love.

In 1875 Helen returned to Fort Benton and then Helena where Wilbur and Harriet Fisk Sanders and their five sons extended protection to her.  Wilbur was a prosecutor for the Vigilantes and a founder of the Montana Historical Society.  Hey, we don’t need to watch Deadwood -- we’ve got Last Chance Gulch.  The end of Custer is in 1876.

Helen taught grade school and became the Lewis and Clark County school superintendent.  1883 was the year six hundred Blackfeet on the reservation starved to death because of failure to receive the commodities they were owed by treaty.  By then there were no more buffalo except farther south and east, but the Blackfeet were forced by cavalry to go back to the reservation and stay without food.  If the Parisians were helpless against the Prussians, so were the Blackfeet helpless against the United States government, which was listening to cattlemen like Sanders.  Economics trumps treaties.

Helen never married, Graybill found in Helen’s papers a long letter from a lover named Henry, writing from SF in 1884.  She was beautiful: tall, graceful, long-haired, with a deep husky voice.  Her face is almost sweet, nothing at all like the gaunt later face of her nephew, the wood-carver John Clarke, a exceptionally handsome man in youth.

  

http://johnclarke.lppcarver.com  Helen evidently did not write any books, though Graybill tells us what she read and admired.  I might pretend to be her and see if I could produce a convincing manuscript.  Maybe I’ll “find” it and see what happens.  (Check tomorrow.)

None of this is so longagoandfaraway.  Denise Juneau’s father, Stan, was one of my high school English students.  Natawista’s great-great grandson was in my Cut Bank High School classes: he looked just like her.  Bob and I visited John Clarke many times and attended his funeral.  History is a river of blood running through us and someday we will be someone else’s history.  

WRITING ABOUT THE REZ

In earlier days several writers like Grinnell, Schultz, Linderman, wrote about the US side Blackfeet in a semi-popular way, not quite rigorously anthropological  as Ewers, the two Kehoes, Macfie, and others.  On the Canada side there have been white people married to Blackfoot people, like Hungry Wolf, Dempsey, but also an effort to enlist the indigenous leaders in books by and for each other.  Some whites writing about Indians are not worth reading, like Lancaster and a gay poet I won’t name who taught in Heart Butte or Renshaw, who only wrote abut cowboys anyway.  Paul Rosier went to original manuscripts to compose a history of rez self-governance  of great value.  William Farr composed a photo album that shows you the early days.

Otherwise, the bulk of writing has been done by James Welch, who was of mixed ancestry but enrolled with the Blackfeet because his father was.  Percy Bullchild is notable.  Many of the enrolled people channeled their info through white people, noted as “informants”.  Kari Lynn Dell, who is Blackfeet, is the most modern of Blackfeet writers but is writing as "romance" and rodeo rather than a privileged demographic.  Her readers are international.

Some of these books are mercifully unknown, but none seem to be aware that the Blackfeet are not the only indigenous people on the rez -- the long relationship with Metis/Cree is largely unknown -- or that like any other demographic there is change over time.  In 1903 when my father-in-law, T.E. Scriver, and the original Sherburne came to Browning the People had suffered a series of barely survived deprivations and impoverishments.  The reservation kept shrinking and missionaries claimed authority while the white ranchers claimed the grass and the railroad claimed the land.  Photos of the time show the town square and the government square just across Willow Creek from each other.  The government square, laid out to be a cavalry parade ground, was finished in 1895 with 22 wooden frame buildings.  The agent at the time was George Steell, the man whose Blackfeet wife had been allotted the land where Swift Dam was built.  This dam, later a killer, was the origin of the irrigation system that still sustains the small white village of Valier.

Writers rarely consider what was happening in the rest of the country or in Europe.  For instance, the locust infestation that invaded the midwest meant that commodities meant for the Blackfeet were intercepted for the “citizens” there.  Hunger was always the biggest challenge to survival.  It still is.

Each war brought its own influx of new people.  Not much has been written about the aftermath of WWI except that many tribal people saw it as a chance to be warriors. Pics of the time show signs of assimilation.    After WWII there was a wave of veterans looking to start businesses and when I came in 1961, they were the core of the white town.  Bob and his brother were veterans.  The Korean War was the one DRK used to talk about because he served there.  Then was the Vietnam War and the great wave of rebellion, rethinking, redeeming that resulted in clearing whites off the rez because the government employees were now asked to be enrolled.

I came just before that, about the time JFK and LBJ addressed the housing problem by building housing projects, which changed the limits and boundaries of the town.  Browning had always been an “island” inside the reservation that was claimed by the state.  This was buttressed by the town’s own police system that was started by white businessmen after WWII when so many veterans came back traumatized, addicted, bereft of family, and inclined to violence.  Bob Scriver was police magistrate and justice of the peace.  The FBI took over, and then was forced to in turn to relinquish some of their system to the tribe.  Often the same guys were cops in each system. Most of the problems developed in the court system, which had an uncertain relationship with the white courts off the rez and at first did not accommodate the separation of powers the whole nation is now losing.

Then agreements were made with the county sheriffs and after that the FBI withdrew to Denver.  When AIM grew powerful and it was rumored that Blackfeet were the killers at Wounded Knee, I was terrified that I’d know who they were as my former students.  But we never found out.

This is a big rez, 50 miles on a side, and divided partly by drainages of the rivers, partly by north/south, partly by tourist visits, and in layers according to generations, education, prosperity, and in more recent years the level of education, which can go all the way to post-grad and includes lawyers,  videographers, wildlife specialists, most of the rez teachers, and the faculty and staff of the Blackfeet Tribal College. One pocket of people will be nearly 19th century and another mini-settlement reaches into the future.  It's too complex for journalists and outsiders in general.

At any point along this time-line, one could write a different story.  I tried to write generational stories in steps and called it “12 Blackfeet Stories.”  It was not published and can usually be found online or in local libraries.  I wrote another about teaching in Heart Butte, called it “Heartbreak Butte” and ended up simply posting it as a blog.  They're meant to be examples for local writing.

Outsiders are often convinced that there is secret knowledge among the People, something magic and powerful.  Some of the People know that as well, but they aren’t about to tell some white journalist they met in a bar.  Another continuum exists between white Romantics and Order-makers who don’t believe anything they don’t already know.  Always abiding on the rez are ranching and art, worlds of their own.

When I became aware of Sid Gustafson and to review his books on my blog, his father “Rib” came up to Valier and invited me to lunch to be interviewed to see what I was like at this point.  He had sort of known me in the Sixties when he was our veterinarian.  We had a good time; I probably knew Rib better than I know Sid now.  We’ve never shared a lunch or even a coffee.  We met face to face once at the Montana Festival of the Book, a merchandizing event "selling authors".  I may have met his sibs since they live around here, but I couldn’t recognize them.  Sid and I watch each other’s work, we know the same people and places.  Sid is more romantic about it all than I am, but he was a boy when I was already grown and early impressions stick.  I’ve never based a story character on him.  We should do a little 2-person seminar sometime, how to write about what you love, this so-called rez.  We have no reservations about it. 

This is one of the best online intros to the Blackfeet rez, written by a “real Indian.”  Enrolled, at least.  Journalism is a good entry point for indigenous.

https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/10-things-you-should-know-about-the-blackfeet-nation-yp18fvBzJEWXBDtP7oFQ5Q

LOCAL HISTORICAL PLAGUES

Two major epidemics have affected the history of the Blackfeet but are largely unknown, even by the People themselves.  One was an epidemic of trachoma that blinded many people and the other was a plague of mange that caused a great many horses to be killed.  it also affected dogs.

Alonzo Skunkcap lived in a log cabin two doors down from the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife.  He was very old and had been blinded by trachoma, (awkwardly related to STD) a disease that settles in tender sexual organs instead of eyes.  Wood stoves made eyes easy targets because the floating particulate irritated them.  So many people went blind that other tribes called the Blackfeet “the one-eyed people.”

“Trachoma is a contagious bacterial infection that affects the surface of the eyes. Over time, scar tissue or ulcers can form that lead to blindness. Currently around 1.9 million people worldwide are blind or visually impaired by trachoma, and it remains a public health problem in 44 countries.”

When the much-maligned Doug Gold came to Browning because his father was the Presbyterian minister in town, and became the superintendent of schools, he had a friend back east who was an expert eye doctor.  He arranged for the man to come to treat the sufferers and also to teach Gold and others how to treat the infection themselves.  It was simple.  One used a matchstick to roll the eyelid inside out and coated the underside with a medicinal ointment that killed the infection, which was not a virus.  These were the early days of antibiotics.

“Recorded knowledge of trachoma dates back as far as 1900 bc , with descriptions appearing in the Egyptian Ebers papyrus. Ancient Greek physicians were also familiar with the disease, and Galen described the rough inner lining of the upper eyelid that is symptomatic of repeated infections. Ibn 'Isa, an Arab physician during the 11^th century, correctly observed that chronic trachoma infection results in trichiasis, which is a painful condition characterized by infolding of the upper eyelid such that the eyelashes scratch the cornea. European experiences with trachoma were first noted during the French occupation of Egypt in the late 18^th century. During the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, trachoma emerged as a well-documented public health problem in England, parts of Europe, and the United States, with several nations forming eye hospitals whose specific aim was the treatment and quarantine of the disease.”

My “learning” horse was cheap because he was suspected of mange, which was an historical pandemic among horses. The cavalry simply shot hundreds of horses to stop it, though it meant the people lost their wealth.  I had remembered this as happening here, but now I think it happened more to the Nez Perce herds.  I can’t find historical confirmation online as Wikis tend to avoid such topics.

When I was hired to monitor Jr. Hi. study halls in 1988, I was also required to watch the school buses arrive to prevent bullying as well as catching those who saw a good chance to ditch school.  I sat on a parapet to watch and a dog would come to visit with me.  I petted him and saw he had a homemade collar that said, “Imitah.”  Blackfeet for dog.  But I didn’t register that this dog had mange.  I was dumb.

The boy who had collared the dog asked me why I paid attention to it.  Then he told his father and the dog disappeared.  The father knew mange and knew the definitive cure for it.  The boy told me his father had “taken my dog to the country.”  I’m ashamed to be so ignorant.

TB and polio were both once prevalent on the Blackfeet rez.  At one point in the Fifties, before the vaccine, tourists would be afraid to stop in Browning or if they had to, would stay in their cars and just roll down the windows a crack to ask questions.  Before I could teach in 1961, I had to have a TB test.  Testing as many people as possible was one of the ways TB was brought under control, though the bug still lingers.  

If one accepts the premise that living things are defined by nuclei with DNA contents (and a few other fragments of DNA in small bodies inside the cell) and that DNA fragments can float and move throughout the air, water, and soil, then we must also accept that DNA are bits of life instructions that can be either helpful or not, devastating or unnoticed. Diseases are only visible manifestations of the underlying and persistent causes, which are poverty, inability to wash up with soap. bad nutrition, decaying shelter and the like.  

There is a major collection of knowledge about viruses, esp. those of “colds” and “flu” that are capable of morphing quickly so they renew their potency.  Much of the work on Corvid19 is informed by SARS and MERS, other viruses that crossed from animals to create pandemics, though not as big or global as this one.  HIV comes closer, but is so stigmatized that scientists and media both avoid talking about it, which is not helpful.

“Two or 6 minutes of exposure to soap and water decreased the infectivity of HIV by more than 1000-fold, the authors report in the medical journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. When the virus was in a CVL-seminal fluid mixture, a stronger concentration of soap in water was required to reduce viral infectivity by 30-fold.”

www.natap.org/2003/nov/113003_21.htm

It’s impossible to scrub the body internally, so the virus is safe inside someone unless there are antibodies or some drug that can change its DNA/RNA directions.  But it is never emphasized enough that soap is a necessity and often not available to a victim of poverty or homelessness.

My intimate adventures were before HIV, so I worried more about pregnancy or poverty. I was more endangered by the latter.  Nevertheless, this household of cats today could easily bring in zoonoses from grassland rodents, like hantavirus, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, tularemia, and plague.  One does not normally wash cats with soap and water, nor do they wash the mice they catch.

There is a theory of health that talks about living in an alert and harmonious way, holistically.  This becomes relevant when challenges are so undetectable, omnipresent, and potentially devastating.  But there’s another angle which is nearly opposite, which is that the body’s protections “learn” according to exposure and if nothing is ever present, always disinfected or prevented, the immune system is dumb.  Its book has no pages.  This is also a point of view I accept, so that leaves me with contradictions.

A third approach, which I like, notes that the body produces its own preventatives as molecules that come from internal organs, generated by happiness and safety.  A contented and productive life often means good health.  As a culture we are not supporting this as much as we should.  One can only pretend to sell happiness; it’s not for sale. In fact, it’s not found through pursuit. It is an emergence from a lot of other things, including risk.

2 MEN IN A LIMINAL BORDERLAND

Until now these two biographical sketches didn't really fit together.  One is a man I first knew as a teenaged student and the other I first knew as an adult cop ten years older than me.  They really had nothing in common directly, except for a shared pattern.  They weren't related.  Now both of them are long dead.  The pattern is that they were respectable if uninvested kids, then became dangerously violent esp. to the people they loved, and after something hidden happened, became ceremonialists, very serious and taken very seriously by outsiders.  Even some rez people.

Some people here will know who I'm talking about and that's okay.  I just want to protect them a bit from outsiders.  Besides, they may be a novel some day.  They were men who lived in the strange borderlands between enrolled rez people of achievement, often pretty well assimilated and certainly accepted, and other people who had a dangerous edge.  Besides the reality of the rez, they represented the Nitzitahpi old ways to a certain kind of white person who was very curious and worshipful of those ways.

My fav story of the younger one involved an NPR producer who came to find out all about the magic secrets.  X took her on his usual tour, which took all day and for which he rarely charged enough money, and she chattered away, asking a zillion questions, drunk on this reality of being with an Indian on a rez.  Finally X couldn't stand it any longer and turned from behind the wheel of the Jimmy.  "Would you please just shut up for ten minutes so I can think what I'm doing?"

She did, abashed.  Her companion hid his smile.  He never got to say anything.

Both men withdrew from enrolled partners and chose white women who were impressed by their later status as "medicine men," if you want to call them that.  In some ways they are more like the Greek boatman who takes the dead to the underworld.  Charon with his boat, using a pole to cross the River Styx.  Not at all a Blackfeet idea.  Anyway they didn't ferry others.  They just went there.  To death.  At first in alcoholic blackouts, then in realizing what they done to others.  I guess.  I wasn't close enough to either one to hear any stories of repentance. 

I interpret them to entering a boundary country between two cultures, partly created by them, partly the reality of both white people -- even in urban areas -- and partly the reality of the east slope Rockies rez.  It is imaginary and yet it is inhabited and even celebrated.  This vid is an example of that liminal place where two cultures overlap, overlay.  This never existed before.  It is ceremonial but not historic and has nothing to do with "first contact," that shock.  But how vivid this is, how much we are drawn in, how much the original people are celebrated.  What outsider visitors can't see is how much this is about families, how much it knits together a pan-Indian view that has political consequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTJvpfkRRdA  

This is the source of kitsch: dream-catchers, "Indian tacos," but also the source of a new going-forward identity.  About  as real as a rodeo is in comparison to ranching, pow-wows of this kind still present a recognizable "face" to people who have no other contact with what they think are "Indians".  There are no khaki-clad anthros to push French deconstruction theory. (Still, Presentation is so important!)  More New Orleans Mardi Gras than authentic historicism, pow-wow has an authority all its own as a Performance.

Neither of these men I'm thinking about was a pow-wow dancer, but they occupied a similar sort of mystique in a slightly more sophisticated context.  People in the this ceremonial world are deeply serious.  A few are whites, maybe Vietnam vets, who have come to the rez for nothing less than salvation.  They put up Sun Lodge frames, conventional tipis, and hundred-willow sweat lodges and sit together dark and hot, singing and telling stories and testifying.  The effect on these two men was to find a way out of abusive violence and the self-contempt of their earlier years.

The younger female English teacher lover had been badly beaten and she left for home.  The older woman stayed but was a second wife and not exactly welcome.  I don't know whether she stayed after her husband died.

The younger one of these ceremonialists mixed it with speaking for the history and was on several videos.  When I heard him speak, I recognized the indignation and sorrow about the past but it wasn't quite the same set of facts that I had known from books and conversation.  The older one was outside my circle, though I knew his children, who were quite unlike him.  The two men were meant to be outside the circles I knew and they were in fact.  I didn't attend the lectures or ceremonies.  My knowledge of such things was of couples who were in their eighties during the Sixties, nearly the last of the buffalo people.

This liminal borderland, partly fact and partly raw emotion, was known to me, partly in print and partly in conversation, for unique reasons.  It was presented to me, not participated in as had been the earlier ceremony.  I had no role but observer.  But the two men were neither readers nor writers and I don't know any writers who tried to portray them or their secret worlds.  Their worlds are more than a little bit dangerous.  They went in and out of criminal circles, without ever identifying them that way.  Maybe during ceremonies those men (all men) were not criminals for a short time, free from conscience and blame, reaching for something beyond forgiveness, a world unknown.

Some of the people who visit the liminal quasi-autochthonous borderlands are missing the reality of it.  They accept the German meticulous reproduction of artifacts and words they think will take them to a different place of reproduction, a different kind of authenticity.  But it is these two men with violent pasts who found their way to dignity and lived there until the end.  I think about them.